release

Put Up Your Dukes and Fight with buGG

/ Homicidol Maniac

It finally arrived! I first listened to buGG’s new “MY FIGHT SONG” single what feels like a couple of weeks ago, on the Spotify, and figured that there’d be an MV at some point. And now there is!

Watching buGG grow from the fun sidecar PIIIIIIIN little sisters into, well, very much their own thing has been cool. They still have that signature impossible energy and outright bounce to their sound. I just can’t believe it’s only their second single ever! I mean, the discography available online isn’t exactly sparse, just that, like, you usually expect way more singles than other releases, this being idol and all. They’ve only been at this for like three years! But anyway:

Fun fact: Everything about this is hundreds of percents cooler than every American pop punk thing ever done

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This Is a New Single from Haruno Yumu

/ Homicidol Maniac

When you’ve been at this idol game for a while, not only do you find yourself with a startling amount of otherwise useless knowledge, the amount of recall you’ve built up as a bank gets to be almost harrowing to consider. I had the privilege of talking about ye olde website and its advent a couple of weeks back with a friend who I hadn’t seen in years, for instance, and after getting through the tl;dr Homicidols Elevator Pitch, he sort of good-naturedly challenged me on just how much there would really be to talk about. I made him look through our archives on his phone while I narrated the process of discovering literally hundreds of loud-aligned idol groups over time, and following his surprise waxed nostalgic on certain acts from way back in the day, names like petit pas! and THE SPUNKY and Tsubasa Fly, names you might not recognize if you’ve only been around in the past couple of years. And then I enjoyed telling him about the long-timers that are still out there! Your You’ll Melt More! and NECRONOMIDOL and … UNDER BEASTY. And that’s when I kind of lit up, for not only do I love them all, but UB holds a very special place in my heart for having navigated their way from a truly indie origin all the way to a major label. Anybody who’s ever turned to their idiot friends and said “we should start a band!” (as I had several times with the friend mentioned here) can relate to the excitement that wells up inside in those moments — and UB lived it.

So yeah, while I did just get to post about UNDER BEASTY recently and reflect a bit on that trajectory therein, here’s another chance because Yumu just dropped her second single: Continue reading →

In a Very Important Friday Tradition, We Have New STARMARIE

/ Homicidol Maniac

When was the last time we got to do a STARMARIE post? I know things have been weird out there, but Friday and STARMARIE used to go together like spaghetti and meat sauce (which is to say, deliciously). Yeah, more often than not it was just live clips, but what’s wrong with that? Truth be told, ol’ STARMARIE hasn’t done a whole lot of new material in recent times, and IIRC it’s been almost a year since their last release, and nowadays Homicidols Dot Com really relies on those new releases to have things to talk about.

BUT THIS IS A STARMARIE POST, and if there’s one thing that STARMARIE has always been good at providing, it’s cool idorock befitting their gimmick as like guardians of esoteric knowledge or what have you, but actually more precisely it’s cool idorock that works well as theme songs for other media. And here we are again! I was very pleased to find that STARMARIE had a whole new MV for a whole new song, like just generally, and deeply unsurprised to see that it’s a theme for a movie: Continue reading →

I Enjoy This Particular BiSH Song Template

/ Homicidol Maniac

So as I was saying before, I had pretty high hopes for this BiSH album (out now!), and they graced us this morning with another MV from it, which:

I am supposed to be working right now, so this is also very short, so let’s suffice it to say that while the opening worried me that we had another “Orchestra” clone, “BE READY” here is more reminiscent of stuff from the FAKE METAL JACKET era, which for my money was actually the superior point in BiSH anthems, though now it’s both grown up and does include some tropes familiar to anybody who likes WACK artists or even just SCRAMBLES products.

I get to listen to the album today and remain pretty stoked about it.

Yuna :*(

/ Homicidol Maniac / 1 Comment

Got to wake up to very bad news this morning. I’ll thank Papermaiden for messaging it without trying to soften the blow: “Yuna out of PassCode.”

It’s been a few years since Yuna first went on hiatus due to an ovarian cyst, and the way her and management’s statement reads, the pressure of performing eventually just got to be too much. You know she was taking a break from the STRIVE tour over the last several weeks — a break that in retrospect feels more like “take a few weeks off and think about it” than “get your rest” — so I can’t blame her for not feeling like coming back was the way to go. Continue reading →

It’s Good to See PapiRosier After All This Time

/ Homicidol Maniac

Some idol groups, even those that are just grinding away on chika stage after chika stage, release tons of material and as a result are super accessible; others … not so much. I do have a gift for recall, fortunately, so it’s rare to really, truly forget about a unit once introduced, but as time goes on and life’s priorities change, I do have to admit to being surprised when certain projects pop up from the blind spots in my mind.

Like PapiRosier, who released this MV the other day for their new single! This is the first thing I wrote about them, in the summer of 2016; we have averaged 0.8 post per year from them since, as that seems to be the approximate release schedule. And given how things change over time and the whole “heavy idol” thing has run its course in certain ways, I fully expected this MV to be a simple, sparkling idol song, probably kind of anthemic because that’s what they do, but bereft of much in the way of rock sounds and definitely not something to blog a post about: Continue reading →

The New SIPP Single Is Awesome

/ Homicidol Maniac

This website is very pro-SIPP, to the point where I’m very comfortable saying right now that they’re the best debut of 2021 so far and will be very hard to dethrone. “3 or Two” is their latest single, out this past week, and frankly if this one doesn’t convince you that they’re as legit as it gets and gods be good future mainstays we’ll be talking about for years, I don’t know if we can be friends:

Just, what a group. Talent across the roster, excellent diversity of voices, very little in the way of gimmicks, somehow elevating both the “pop” and “punk” parts of their theme beyond what anybody else is doing with either, absolutely masterful hook … there are other groups doing good pop punk, and some do it very well at that, but is anybody doing it better than SIPP? Friend, I think not.

March of the PIGGS

/ Homicidol Maniac

I’ve just always wanted to title a post this, thanks Lui

The new PIGGS single hits stores in a few days, and mid-last week they released the second MV from it (first), and it’s still not the title track, so that leaves a great deal of hope in there being yet another video coming our way. But for the whole reason that I got a NIN vibe before even listening to the thing, here’s “Piggy”:

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Here’s NELN’s Entry for Song of the Summer

/ Homicidol Maniac

I’ve been on the lookout for good summertime best-of candidates around the idolverse the past few weeks — our pal N.FENI sort of stole a lot of that thunder though — and frankly coming up kind of short. Am I crazy? I feel like it was normal in the past for even the alt/chika scene to get a few good candidates (even if they were piss-takes) into the mix, and this year just not so much. Pandemic? Olympics? Everybody forgot how calendars work?

Anyway, not a whole lot has happened this week, but our well-loved pals in NELN did drop an album the other day (stuff we know, though), and along with it a new single that … no, screw it, I already ruined the pun.

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I’ve Now Seen Enough to Know That I’m Looking Forward to the New BiSH Album

/ Homicidol Maniac

I think I figured out a pattern when it comes to BiSH in their “officially a big deal” era — the more seriously a release is treated by the group, the higher the likelihood that it might actually be kind of butt. Take for example Letters from last year. Yes, it did very literally top the charts; on the other hand, the only sentiment I got from fans in this particular circle was that the record was a disappointment. A win for WACK and Avex for sure, maybe less so for us. But when the announcement about GOiNG TO DESTRUCTiON landed a few weeks ago, I got a truly giddy feeling: Here was the BiSH that I love most, on the one hand playing into their old chaos merchants persona while also taking the same to a ridiculous level as a send-up of the self-serious approaches they’ve more recently taken to some of their bigger releases:

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